Drama: Quality Assurance - external verification

External verification is part of SQA's quality assurance process designed to ensure that a centre's assessment approach and assessment judgements are valid, reliable and meet national standards.

All SQA internal assessments must be internally verified by centres.

Unit assessment

The new qualifications offer opportunities for personalisation and choice. Teachers and lecturers have more flexibility to determine the most appropriate methods of assessment for individual learners, and to use their professional judgement in determining whether or not a candidate's evidence meets the Outcomes and Assessment Standards of the Unit.

Any evidence for assessment must be of a type that allows valid judgements to be made against Outcomes and Assessment Standards. Candidate evidence for Unit assessment in this subject is therefore likely to include some of the following:

• text, graphical or pictorial evidence, including printable electronic
• electronic product that is not printable
• oral presentation or other oral response
• performance
• ephemeral evidence of skills demonstrated during preparation for performance
• product (eg, a prop)

SQA has anticipated that some Units for this subject will have candidate evidence suitable for submission for a verification event, and others are likely to require visiting verification. Details of this are in the document: Types of verification for Units. Guidance on evidence to be presented in each case, including formats for submitting candidate evidence for events, can be found in the Evidence for visiting verification and Evidence for verification events documents.

If recordings of performances are made for the purposes of verification, centres must ensure that the quality is sufficiently high to allow an External Verifier to verify the centre's assessment judgements.

Further information on verification can be found at our Overview of Quality Assurance.